Frommer's National Parks of the American West - Don Laine [273]
Access to the floor of Canyon de Chelly is restricted. To enter the canyon, you must be accompanied by a park ranger or an authorized guide (unless you're on the White House Ruins Trail). Navajo guides will lead you into the canyon on foot or in your own or their four-wheel-drive vehicle, and there are also guided horseback tours. Check at the visitor center for fees and other details.
The shady (and free) Cottonwood Campground has 96 sites, a dump station, and toilets. There is water in summer only.
To get to Canyon de Chelly from Cortez, Colorado, follow U.S. 160 south and west 76 miles into Arizona to U.S. 191, which you take south 62 miles to Chinle, where you turn east to enter the park, which is open daily year-round. Admission is free.
For information, contact Canyon de Chelly National Monument, P.O. Box 588, Chinle, AZ 86503 (☎ 928/674-5500; www.nps.gov/cach).
24
MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK
by Don & Barbara Laine
ON SUMMER WEEKENDS, WHEN "THE MOUNTAIN IS OUT," AS THE locals say, busloads of noisy tourists descend on Mount Rainier, camcorders whirring and cameras clicking. But for anyone willing to expend a little bit of energy to get away from the roadside crowds, this mountain, which dominates the Puget Sound and western Washington skyline for miles around, has many secrets to share: mountain goats and marmots, streaming waterfalls, ominous walls of ice deep in the rain forest, and thousand-year-old trees set against subalpine meadows teeming with summer wildflowers.
Should you visit on a wet, dreary October day, you may theorize that Mount Rainier was named for its climatological proclivities. In fact, Capt. George Vancouver named it in 1792 for his friend Rear Adm. Peter Rainier (who never laid eyes on the mountain). The region's native people had been calling it Tahoma, or other variations, for centuries, however, and the name remained (and some might say remains) contentious until the early 19th century. Nevertheless, the mountain is known as Rainier to most people, and a sprawling city to the northwest, Tacoma, wound up with the American Indian name. Rainier was finalized as the name when the park was established in 1899.
Native peoples hunted deer, elk, and mountain goat and gathered huckleberries on its lower slopes for thousands of years. Today, Mount Rainier is a symbol of the wild Northwest, providing constant reassurance of the beauty that lies beyond the sprawl of suburbia.
Although the early pioneers saw most of the mountains in the West as obstacles, 14,411-foot Mount Rainier so captivated the settlers that as early as the 1850s, less than a decade after Seattle was founded, aspiring mountaineers were heading for its snowcapped slopes. In 1857, an army lieutenant, August Valentine Kautz, climbed to within 400 feet of the summit. In 1870, Gen. Hazard Stevens and Philemon Van Trump made the first recorded complete ascent of the mountain. (Trapped near the summit at dark, they survived the night huddled in ice caves formed by sulfurous steam vents, with the steam providing enough heat to keep them from freezing to death.) In 1884, James and Virinda Longmire opened the mountain's first hotel, at a spot that now bears their name. In 1899, Mount Rainier became the nation's fifth national park, and by 1916, the system now known as the Wonderland Trail was completed, forming a loop nearly 100 miles long around the mountain.
Because of its massive network of glaciers and unpredictable weather, Mount Rainier is an unforgiving peak. Dozens of climbers have died on its slopes, yet each year about 10,000 people set out for the summit of the dozing volcano. Only about half of them ever reach the top, however. The rest are turned back by bad weather, altitude sickness, exhaustion, and hazardous glacial crossings. This is not a mountain to be